It would be nice to breathe fresh life into social construction tools like the Discussion Board. Currently managing posts, reviewing and directing students to use a discussion board is time consuming and not very popular. The discussion board could be so much more effective if it could allow you to:
- set up a discussion board activity where each user has to make a post and there is a tracking sheet that clearly shows if a student has made a post in thread.
- A task is set whereby a student is automatically allocated another students' post to reply to. Again, the tracking sheet allows easy review of task completion. (This would also reduce the usual issue of certain posts receiving more responses and others languishing without peer interaction.)
- A further column in the tracking sheet that shows how many posts a student made overall to the discussion board task activity that was set up.
I also like the 3CQ approach (see Inside Higher Ed article) that could be promoted to encourage further development of skills in forum discussions.
